The present invention relates to dispensers.
In particular, the present invention relates to that type of dispenser which is designed to dispense articles such as bodies which are sealed within compartments of a strip of sheet material.
Although many different types of dispensers for the above purpose are known, the conventional dispensers suffer from a number of drawbacks. In the first place their construction is exceedingly complex so that the conventional dispensers are expensive to manufacture and are inconvenient to operate. In the second place, even though such conventional dispensers are capable of making a body sealed in a compartment of sheet material available to the operator, nevertheless the operator must with conventional dispensers of the above type manually tear a body in its sealed compartment from the strip of sheet material, and this latter requirement is a particular inconvenience. Furthermore, conventional dispensers of the above type are difficult to reload when the contents thereof have been exhausted.
Furthermore, it is often desirable to give to the operator an indication of when a body should be removed from the dispenser. For example when the bodies are in the form of medication, it will generally be required that the bodies be taken from the dispenser at predetermined intervals. For this purpose, it has already been proposed to provide conventional dispensers with indicia printed or otherwise mounted thereon for indicating various time intervals. However, if the operator forgets to look at the dispenser to check when the next body should be removed from the dispenser, the taking of the medication at the required intervals can be overlooked in an exceedingly undesirable manner which often is of critical importance to the operator since these matters deal with the health of the individual.